Welcome to Animal Cracker Studio! If you have joined me from the One Room Challenge website, it is great to have you. I hope you will stick around and explore. We are transforming a little girl's bedroom into a shared bedroom for her and her older brother as mom awaits baby number 3. Mom and Dad are putting in most of the work to get this room in shape. You can start here if you would like to read the rest of the story.

Five weeks down and one week to go in this shared kids’ room decorating project. The kids are excited to finally move into their new bedroom but Mom and Dad have quite the list left to accomplish.

Do-it-yourself decorating is not what you see on HGTV.

What this list doesn’t tell you is that a lot of work has already been done. The bedroom is painted. All of the furniture has been received. The closet has been re-designed, built, and painted. The closet bins are in and already stuffed with clothing.

The dresser drawer fronts have been primed and painted. W even helped his mom prime the dresser. The kid's a natural.

We have new sheets to go with the existing quilts and art for the wall next to the dresser. The original purple and white curtains will be replaced with something more neutral (or maybe the fun striped curtains that Whitney loved from the beginning) and the original light will be replaced with something more interesting.

In addition to Whitney and Dusty’s list, I still have to come up with some art or something for the wall at the foot of the bed.

See that glaring white space? Not that every single wall needs something on it, but this one may need a little bit.

C’s dollhouse will be at the foot of the bed so I would like something that is fun and tall. I love this colorful bookshelf and also this little dress up station, but we are quickly running out of time. Dusty’s grandmother gave Whitney and Dusty a painting of the kids that I would love to hang somewhere in the room. Perhaps a gallery wall with some kid-made art? This might be a good way to bring back the PJ Masks that Mom and W are negotiating. Can I tell you a little secret? I’m really leaning towards a painted chalk wall right there. I know C loves to draw and can’t think of a better place for her to do it. Any thoughts on that idea?

I’ll be hiding out in this secret garden today if anyone needs me... #wishthiswasmyyard

School picture day. And it finally feels like fall in #houston

Today is #dayofthegirl , a day created by the UN to celebrate the strength of girls and acknowledge the barriers girls face in all over the world. Yesterday in our #girlscout meeting, we made pins to wear today and we worked thru the @wagggs_world curriculum around International Day of the Girl and gender equality. I can best sum up the girls’ discussion by quoting one of the girls: “Mind blown.” (Imagine this with full 8yo drama quotient and hand motions. It was rich.) 👧🏾👧🏼👧🏽👧🏿👧🏻 I wrote a big, long caption about the importance of this day in a global context but the fact of the matter is that my 8yo daughter, who proudly wore a pin last night to dinner (swipe left), won’t wear her pin to school today because she thinks the boys will make fun of her. “They expect me to like certain things and act a certain way, Mom.” Full stop. 👧🏽👧🏻👧🏾👧🏿👧🏼 I’m angry. And I’m incredibly sad. And I’m sharing that here because real life. 👧🏻👧🏽👧🏿👧🏼👧🏾 I get that kids will be kids and the boys in question certainly don’t have an intent to exclude girls simply because they are girls. Or if they do have that intent it’s because both genders think the other stinks at this age. I get that my daughter’s insecurities are her own, her assumptions about what may happen are her own, and I’m sure I’ve contributed to both by being a loud mouth feminist. But y’all. Our kids - our daughters and our sons - deserve better than this. They deserve better than to continue to live within the confines of worn out stereotypes of gender roles. I’m open to ideas. How are we going to change this? #bethechange

I don’t typically celebrate “wins”. To be clear, it’s not that I object to public acknowledgment of success, just that it’s more my nature to move on to the next thing once (if ever) something is complete. It’s also possible that my idea of a win has always been substantially larger than getting dinner on the table. Hence the parenthetical in the previous sentence. 🌮🥟🥞 Today, however, I want to acknowledge some wins and I want to do so publicly so that those of you reading this who are like me, who have what others call “high expectations” (virgos and type As anyone?), and who beat yourselves up over the incomplete items on the list instead of noticing the things that you actually did (and that probably weren’t even on the list to begin with) - YES ! I'm talking to you! You might possibly recognize yourself. (Also that was certainly a run-on sentence. Let’s move on.) 🏅🏆🎖 Today, I said yes to yoga with a fellow mom who I don’t know well, which was uncomfortable on more than one front. And it turned out to be amazing. Health and well-being win. 🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️🧘🏻‍♀️ Today, I intended to join in with One Room Challenge for the 5th time. I sat down and wrote a blog post about why I was participating only to find in the writing that I no longer felt the need to participate. So I didn’t. And on top of that, I didn’t feel that the time writing was time wasted. Down with busy for the sake of busy win. 🏡🏡🏡 Today, my son lost his campaign for representative of his third grade classroom. He came home in tears. But we talked, and he went from never trying anything new again to never trying things with voting to maybe trying things with voting in a couple of years. He ended the day in smiles. I’m not going to lie. There may have been an ice cream sandwich involved. Parenting win. ✅✅✅ Today, I got real dinner on the table, with vegetables and everything, for the third day in a row, despite soccer and music lessons and whatever else. And my kids ate it. And we talked while we ate dinner. Normal, right? I’m going with a win. 🥗🍝🍪 So there it is. The little things have big impact. Tell me, if you’ve made it this far, what was your win today? #ryhsyinnercircle

Thirteen years married to this guy today. Pretty damn lucky. #adventureisoutthere